The Four Nutriments of Life

　　An Anthology of Buddhist Texts

　　translated from the Pali, with an Introductory Essay by

　　Nyanaponika Thera

　　© 2006

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　　Introduction

　　"All beings subsist on nutriment" — this, according to the Buddha, is the one single fact about life that, above all, deserves to be remembered, contemplated and understood.[1] If understood widely and deeply enough, this saying of the Buddha reveals indeed a truth that leads to the root of all existence and also to its uprooting. Here, too, the Buddha proved to be one who "saw to the root of things" (muula-dassaavii).[2] Hence, it was thought useful to collect his utterances on the subject of nutriment (aahaara), together with the instructive explanations by the teachers of old, the commentators of the Paali scriptures.

　　The laws of nutriment govern both biological and mental life, and this fact was expressed by the Buddha when speaking of four kinds of nutriment: edible food, sense-impressions, volitions, and consciousness. It is hunger that stands behind the entire process of nutrition, wielding its whip relentlessly. The body, from birth to death, craves ceaselessly for material food; and mind hungers as eagerly for its own kind of nourishment, for ever new sense-impressions and for an ever expanding universe of ideas.

　　Craving (ta.nhaa) is the principal condition of any "in-take" or "up-take" (upaadaana),[3] that is, of nutriment in its widest sense. This is the first factor common to all types of nutriment, be they physical or mental.

　　The second common factor is the process of the assimilation of food. In the process of eating and digesting, what was external becomes absorbed in the internal; what was foreign matter becomes "one”s own" and is identified with one”s personality. A German proverb says: "Der Mensch ist, was er isst" — "Man is what he eats." And this applies as well to mental nourishment. Our mind also feeds on "external" material: on sense-impressions and variegated experiences; on the contents of the store-house of knowledge accumulated by the race; and on the precipitate derived from all these sources. Also our memories, when they become objects of mind, are as "external" to the present thought-moment as the ideas read in a book. What cannot be absorbed by the system is discarded, and thus, in the body as well as in the mind, there is a constant process of grasping and rejecting, assimilating and dissimilating, identifying with oneself and alienating. When we look closely at this process of nutrition, physical and mental, we shall notice that it is not only the eater who consumes the food, but, in the course of assimilation, also the food devours the eater. There is thus mutual absorption between them. We know how much people can be changed (for better or worse) by ideas they have absorbed and which finally have absorbed and consumed them.

　　These laws governing nutriment (physical and mental) are indeed sufficient to convince a thoughtful observer how illusory the conception of an abiding self or substance is. This alone should be enough to vindicate the Anattaa doctrine, the Buddha”s deeply revolutionizing teaching of not-self.

　　Inpidualized life is, as Paul Dahlke says, "neither a metaphysical ”I”-identity (pure spirit, pure subject, according to the soul-theory of the religions) nor a mere physical process (pure body, pure object, according to scientific materialism), but a nutrimental process and as such it is neither something which is in and by itself, nor something caused by another, but something that is maintaining itself: and all these so-called higher faculties of thinking and feeling are different forms of eating, of maintaining oneself."

　　But in addition to the vindication of the Anattaa doctrine (not…

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